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Archive for the category “User Groups”

Yes it is indeed time for Oracle Open World. Unfortunately I will not be there speaking myself this year, but do not despair my friends, there is still plenty of goodness from the community such as these talks from my good friend Heli. She is coming all the way from Helsinki, Finland to share her knowledge. Go to one of her talks and tell her The Data Warrior sent you!

I cannot believe how fast time flies! It has been an exceptionally busy year and that is the reason I have not had time to write blog posts either. I have been speaking in amazing events like BIWA Summit, APEX Connect, Riga DevDays 2017, OTNEMEA Tour in Baku and in Madrid, BGOUG, E4, KScope17, Oracle Code Bengaluru, the first ever APEX Day in Finland, Oracle Code Seoul, POUG, and Tajikistan TechDay. Next on my list is Oracle OpenWorld. As always it will be a busy week.

I will fly to San Francisco on Thursday to attend the ACE Director briefing on Friday at the Oracle HQ. I will have three talks:

The world of data warehousing and analytics has changed! With the advent of Big Data, Streaming Data, IoT, and The Cloud, what is a modern data warehousing professional to do? It may seem to be a very different world with different concepts, terms, and techniques. Or is it?

2 – Meet the Leaders

While reading books and online articles is great, there is nothing that replaces face to face communication. And the best way to do that is attend educational events where they are speaking. These days that could mean everything from local meet-ups, to regional conferences (like RMOUG), vendor roadshows, and larger annual events (like the recent Oracle OpenWorld).

For meet-ups, simply go to https://www.meetup.com/ and sign up (for free). You can search for meet-ups in your local area by topic. You may be surprised how many there are nearby and how often they have event. This is a great way to network with other professional in your local community.

To learn from the industry leaders, look to larger national and international events. In the data warehousing and analytics world that means groups like The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI). They have local chapters and run larger national events on a regular basis (the next one is in October in San Diego). Another group I am associated with is DAMA International which also sponsors local chapters, national and international events.

And of course your vendors and solution providers may run their own events, like the Snowflake Cloud Analytics city tour.

3- Be a Leader

Volunteer! Yes by getting involved with these meet-ups, associations, and user groups, whether locally or nationally, you not only get to give back to the community, but you will often benefit by getting to know and speak with leaders one on one in a less formal environment.

Start off small by helping organize a meeting, or getting the refreshments. Help with the web site or the mail list. If the group you choose runs a conference, help with the paper selection process (you will learn a ton reading the abstracts). And then, when you are ready, become a speaker yourself. There is no better way to learn than to try to teach what you know to someone else.

I have been helping with user group conferences and events for nearly 30 years now and have never regretted a minute of the time spent.

So those are my top 3 tips for how you can stay fresh and informed and ahead of the game in this crazy world of data warehousing, big data, and the cloud.

Seems to be working for me.

Keep Learning!

Kent

The Data Warrior

P.S. One of our Snowflake customers, IAC Publishing Labs (owners of Ask.com), won the TDWI Best Practice award for the Emerging Technologies and Methods category and Keith Lavery will be speaking about the project at the TDWI Executive Summit in San Diego on Monday, October 3rd.

Pre-OOW Athletics

Well, sort of. This year I walked the Golden Gate Bridge (5K) and took a dip in SF Bay in the 5th Annual Swim The Bay. Proud to say I have attended all 5 years of that event.

Nothing like a brisk morning walk to start the day!

Then there is the brisk swim!

And this year, I got a pretty good size group to do Chi Gung on the beach after the swim (to warm ourselves back up!)

Time to get that chi flowing after the swim!

OTW 2016

I think this is the 3rd time I have presented at the un-conference run in parallel to OOW. But this year was the 1st time I did it as an Oaktable member! Gave my talk on Building a Virtualized ODS using SQL Developer Data Modeler.

No picture from that talk (sorry) but I did a very short Chi Gung set with the attendees at lunch time to get them moving out of their seats.

But there are so many sessions to choose from (mine included), which do you pick? How do you pick?

Well, I (and my fellow bloggers) are here to help you out with a Blog Hop. We are going to give you our top picks for for each track. In this post, I will give you my picks for the Big Data and Advanced Analytics track.

Big Data and Advanced Analytics Sessions

Why did I pick that this track? Really because it is a necessary adjunct to BI and Data Warehousing. In fact I find it hard to imagine that these two really won’t merge over the next few years (at my company, Snowflake, it really has already). Every company that is investing in BI/DW is also finding that they need to deal with Big Data too. And Advanced Analytics is, to me, the logical extension to BI.

So after looking at the agenda, really most of the sessions are of interest to me (sigh). But in reality I am sure I will not be able to attend them all, so here are my top 5 picks to see at KScope16: